Reflections on nature and conservation from field and forest

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by T R Shankar Raman

Road to Perdition, a piece by Neha Sinha and myself published in the July issue of Fountain Ink, triggered a response from Aasheesh Pittie: a handwritten letter that he has posted here on his blog. Aasheesh critiques our piece for not being emphatic or dramatic enough, given the drastic, unprecedented, and barely-regulated assault on India’s environment now underway. He raises vital concerns on how we write about the environment and hoped his letter would begin a dialogue. In the spirit of taking the conversation ahead, here is the letter I wrote in response. Do read his letter first before reading on. And add your thoughts and comments!

by T R Shankar Raman

Gaur grazing at edge of a forest in a tea estate in the Anamalai hills.

You could have imagined you were on a forest trail. Fifty metres away, the dark hulk of a solitary bull gaur, over five feet tall at the shoulder with taut muscles and thick, curving horns, looks up from the swampy valley where he stands in his white-stockinged legs. Eyes locked with gaur, your ears pick up the harsh bark of a great hornbill resounding through the cool mountain air from a patch of tall trees on the hill slope beyond. As you skirt the gaur and walk quietly down the trail, stepping past fresh scat of a sloth bear and dropped quills of a porcupine, a stripe-necked mongoose darts across, a flash of crimson bright against background green. The green is not the multi-hued mosaic of a real forest, but a more uniform smear of a monoculture. Row upon row of neatly pruned metre-high bushes range away in tight lines, punctuated by well-spaced and heavily-lopped silver oak trees. In the mountains of the Western Ghats, at the edge of the Anamalai Tiger Reserve, you are walking through a large tea plantation.

In south India, tea is grown as extensive monocultures with sparse canopy of alien silver oak trees.

Tea plantations often get bad press from environmentalists as ‘green deserts‘. As a form of intensive production based on keeping large estates under a single crop, tea plantations tend to support far fewer wild species than comparable areas under native forests. Still, when one takes a broader perspective, tea estates, too, can play a role in wildlife conservation. Recent field studies show that by modifying conventional land-use practices and protecting some neglected parts of the tea estate landscape these plantations can help conserve wild species. They also illustrate how important it has become to widen the scope of conservation into the countryside outside wildlife protected areas such as national parks and sanctuaries.

by T R Shankar Raman

“One of the hardest things in politics,” US President Barack Obama said in a recent interview, “is getting a democracy to deal with something now where the payoff is long term or the price of inaction is decades away.” Obama’s words are pertinent not only to the rules proposed on June 2 by his administration to cut future carbon emissions by US fossil-fuel power plants as a step to address climate change. They are also relevant to the other great democracy and its spanking new government on the other side of the planet: India.

The science whose central concern is the long term and leaving a healthy environment for future generations is ecology. And within ecology, on a planetary scale, it is the science of climate change. So when India’s new government, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, renamed the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) appending ‘and Climate Change’, it was a timely move. It signalled that even as the government pursues its stated policy of industrial and infrastructural expansion for economic growth, it would place tackling climate change firmly on its agenda, along with the protection of environment, forests, and wildlife.

But a slew of media reports belie this interpretation. According to these reports, the MoEF, in its new avatar, plans to redefine what an inviolate forest is so that more forests can be opened for mining. It proposes to diluteenvironmental norms andprocedures to bypass existing legal requirements for large infrastructure and defence projects. The government announced plans to increase the height of the Sardar Sarovar dam, raising concerns over the rehabilitation of 250,000 people, even as a ‘leaked’ Intelligence Bureau report attacked civil society NGOs for working on ‘people-centric’ issues. Meanwhile, the MoEF has been silent on other pressing needs: releasing the long overdue India State of Forest Report 2013, acting to save critically endangered species such as the Great Indian Bustard (now down to less than 300 individual birds in the wild), or implementing pro-active measures to combat climate change. Within hours of taking charge as Minister of State for Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Prakash Javadekar said with unsettling brevity in a TV interview: “… India needs a window for growth and emissions and other things.” To his credit, Mr Javadekar has promised to ensure that environmental protection and developmental activities will go together. While it is too early to assess promise against practice, this is as good a time as any to recount five lessons from ecology on why environmental protection should concern India’s new government and 1.2 billion plus people.

Thinking long term

Obama’s words point to lesson one: ecology takes the long view. Development projects promoted for short-term gains may have unaccounted long-term costs for people and nation. The previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in its 10-year tenure allowed the conversion or loss of over 700,000 hectares of forest—an area the size of Sikkim—for development projects and non-forest uses. Natural forests of diverse native tree species function as watersheds, wildlife habitats, and sources of livelihood for tribal, farming, and fishing communities, contributing to long term human well-beingin waysnot captured by indices such as annual GDP growth.

The science of restoration ecology attests that such diverse natural forests and the living soils they spring from, once destroyed are difficult and costly, or infeasible to bring back, and appreciable recovery may still take decadestocenturies. This is not adequately factored into the estimation of net present value (NPV) of forests that tries to approximate economic losses over a 20-year period, by which time the losses are ‘recovered’ in compensatory afforestation sites. A project developer pays out the NPV—at current rates, a maximum of Rs 10.43 lakhs per hectare for very dense forests in the most biologically rich regions such as the Western Ghats—and flattens football fields of forests for the price of a mid-range SUV. Furthermore, compensatory afforestation, if carried out at all, frequently involves raising plantations of one or few alien tree species such as eucalypts and wattles. Such artificial forests are no substitute for the more diverse natural forests of mixed native species, including centuries-old trees. This is why, as the Modi government worries over its 100-day report card, ecologists will be concerned about its 100-year fallout.

Minding the connections

Lesson two is that ecology is a science of connections, of food chains from plankton and fish to sharks and men, of energy flowing from sun through grass to deer and tiger. Pluck the hornbills out of their forest home and forest trees whose seeds the birds disperse begin to decline. Destroy forest remnants amidst coffee plantations and farmers suffer as coffee yields dip due to the loss of pollinating bees. Strip the oceans of sharks and predatory fish with industrial fishing and entire ecosystems and livelihoods of artisanal fishers unravel in what ecologists call a trophic cascade. So, the wholesale construction of 300 large dams in the Himalaya as proposed by the government would not just generate power, but have other negativeconsequences radiating down the chains and webs of life, including to people downstream. When these are taken into account, implementing fewer and smaller projects or alternatives appears more attractive.

The third lesson, the mandala of ecology, is that ecology closes the loop. Nature recycles, without externalities, wasting little. If the government applied this to everything from recycling municipal waste to curtailing pollution by industries, it could generate jobs and induce growth without leaving behind irredeemable wastes. Ecology is replete with such cycles. One sees it in the organic farmer practicing rotational shifting agriculture on the hillslopes of north-east India, in the cycle of water from earth to cloud to rain and river, and in the dung beetles and fungi and vultures that help return dung and vegetation and carrion to the elements.

Fourth, ecological processes transcend political boundaries. We pump CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the common pool of our atmosphere anywhere and affect people and the earth’s fabric of life everywhere. The migratory warbler that picks the insects off the plants in our gardens may depend for its survival on protection of its breeding grounds in China or Central Asia. To conserve tigers and elephants in protected reserves, we need to retainconnecting corridors and forests, some spanning state or international boundaries. Development and infrastructure projects can be designed and implemented such that they do not further disrupt fragmented landcapes, but instead help retain remnant forests or reconnect vital linkages.

On the road to development? Destructive projects promoted for short-term gains may have unaccounted long-term costs to people and nation (Photo of logs lying along the Andaman Trunk Road).

The science of home

Finally, ecology teaches us that humans are not external to nature. Land and nature are not commodities to buy or sell recklessly or reduce to a packaged spectacle for tourists to gawk at. They form the community we belong to: we are part of nature, it is home. In the debate over ecology versus economy, we must remind ourselves that both words originate from the Greek word oikos, meaning home. The science of our home environment (ecology) must inform the management of our home resources (economy).

What is often forgotten, in the debate falsely caricatured as environment versus development, is that for almost every destructive project, there are often alternatives and means of implementation that cause less harm to environment and local communities, and can provide overall long-term benefits. For instance, roads can be routed to avoid wildlife sanctuaries and provide better connection to peripheral villages, thus helping both people and wildlife. Decentralised village power generation systems that use biomass, solar power, and other renewable sources can help reduce reliance on mega power projects plagued by corruption and requiring long powerlines that suffer transmission losses and cause forest fragmentation. Mining can be carried out avoiding areas valuable for conservation or local people, after due environment and forest clearances, and keeping aside topsoil to ecologically restore even these areas later.

There are already many promising examples of ecologically sensitive development. If ecologists, engineers, and economists synergise their efforts, and the government chooses to exercise its electoral mandate to take the long view, there can be many more. The integration of ecological considerations into economic development is vital and valuable if, in the pursuit of profit, we are to ensure the long-term well-being of people and planet.

by T R Shankar Raman

In what is being heralded as one of the most visionary efforts in recent times to stem the extinction crisis, a collaborative effort by ecologists and economists from India, Brazil, and the USA has developed a novel solution for biodiversity conservation. Announcing this amidst great excitement today at a packed press conference at the Carneghee Lemon Hall at Park Avenue in Washington, D. C., senior scientist of the Natural Conservation Fund, Dr Ramon Gonsalves, said, “This is the solution. With this, the great wave of extinction will soon be behind us.”

The solution being proposed is a new scheme with an annual worth of 800 billion US dollars that has been given the moniker, Payment for Evolutionary Services and Technology fund (the PEST fund). Explaining the principle behind the PEST fund, Dr. Gonsalves said, ecstatically, “Species are the cornerstone of evolution. The extinction of a species signals the end of a long evolutionary process and deprives us of vital evolutionary resources that we could otherwise exploit for the benefit of mankind. In order to prevent the extinction of species, we have evolved a novel market-linked fund that will incentivise governments, private players, even individuals, to conserve evolutionary processes that make species what they are.”

Initiatives launched with the fund include a 10 million dollar grant to a field research centre in Ecuador to keep Darwin’s Finches evolving in the Galapagos Islands, a 2 million dollar community-based project that will enable villagers in Mexico to keep the mutualism between yucca and yucca moths going, and a seed-grant to an industrial consortium in Birmingham that will experiment with different kinds of air pollution to promote the evolution of different races of peppered moths in the region.

Laboratory-based evolutionary scientists around the world are also overjoyed at the initiative as it earmarks a full 50% or 400 billion US dollars for direct payments to labs breeding populations of the ultimate evolutionary milch-cow that never seems to run out of milk: the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. An additional 5% allocated just for experimentation related to tinkering of Drosophila salivary glands has left competing scientists working on other aspects, such as growing legs on fruit fly heads, virtually salivating.

Financing the fund is the world’s behemoth financial institution, the Bank of the Earth, which is providing the fund on easy terms. For implementing institutions in developed nations, it is provided as a low interest loan, while emerging economies may obtain these funds as interest-free loans or straight grants. This would be decided by economists at the well-staffed Bank of the Earth Coordination Centres currently being established within the offices of Prime Ministers and Presidents in the latter countries.

As in the case of many such large and popular schemes, the PEST fund has led to controversies in academic circles. Trenchant criticism has emerged from rival players who have tried to establish payments for ecosystem services (such as clean air, water, and carbon capture). Besides the loss of a pithy acronym to a larger project, proponents of payments for ecosystem services are worried that PEST funds will actually work against their own limited achievements thus far. The rival group is led by a group think-tank called the Coalition Against Vitiating Evolution for Monetary or Economic Net profits (CAVEMEN). CAVEMEN spokesperson, Dr. Clubb Hunter, in a press statement said, “Many evolutionary processes unleashed by humans work against nature and ecology, such as the evolution of more virulent diseases resistant to our best drugs, the varieties of invasive alien species spreading on every continent, and the evolution of couch-potato genes among certain human groups. Should we really be paying for all this, and that too in hard cash?”

Climate change nay-sayers also receive a fresh shot in the arm as aspects of human endeavour leading to further climate change that is likely to drive adaptation and evolution in plant and animal species are now eligible for PEST funds. The beneficiaries may range from airlines spewing greenhouses gases and engine fumes into the upper atmosphere over polar regions, nuclear and thermal power plants emptying warmed-up coolant water in cold rivers with endemic aquatic fauna, to those raising high-yielding, high-belching methanogenic cattle on Amazonian pastures adjoining biodiversity-rich conservation areas, observers of the PEST fund have noted.

The PEST fund has, however, won support from an unlikely quarter: social scientists and anthropologists. “This scheme is founded on well-established theory in social and human psychology”, said Dr. Eliza Doomuch, a retired social scientist and farmer in Kentucky and an architect of social revolution in the American South. “People will value things only if they are paid to do so”, she said. Taking a leaf from this successful scheme, she has founded a novel movement that promises to rid the world of racism, torture, and genocide, among other things such as parent-offspring conflict and sibling rivalry. This initiative, tentatively labeled Payments for Decency, will provide direct economic incentive to any human who shows basic decency, as defined by the International Consortium of Decent Human Beings, to other humans. Knowledgeable sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, indicated that keeping the future potential of this seminal idea to alleviate human suffering in mind, Dr Doomuch is already in the reckoning for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet, not everyone is happy. Among the first to raise questions about this trend to pay even for basic decency to other humans or to our planet is the Dixie Endeavor for Ecology and Population Solutions for Humanity In Transition, the only such NGO on the planet that does not use any acronym. When contacted for their opinion, this writer was told tersely, “We are refuse to accept this.”

None of these misgivings deterred the gala press conference in Washington, D. C., however. As Dr. Gonsalves said, in an euphoric tone, “We need to save species for human benefit. When humankind stands to gain so directly, it does not really matter how we do it, does it?”

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Disclaimer: All future events even remotely resembling the above fiction are entirely coincidental and unintentional.